On 2013-11-27 09:14:04 +0000, Joseph Rushton Wakeling said:
I'm sure you've heard that old anecdote of the professor back in the 1950s, or was it the 1920s, who, on hearing a student say "infinity", said: "I won't have bad language in class!" :-)
Yes. I think that's part of the reason 0 • inf = NaN in IEEE. The values are taken to be limits of unknown functions. Thus 0 * inf is uncalculable without knowing those functions. There is no such thing as the value infinity.
